Empty bed at The Perley and Rideau Veterans' Health Centre in Ottawa Friday Oct. 27, 2017. The Perley and Rideau Veterans' Health Centre, The Ottawa Hospital (TOH) and the Champlain Local Health Integration Network (LHIN) will announce the launch of an innovative project to improve the quality of healthcare delivered to elderly patients recovering from short-term illnesses as well as surgery and accidents. Tony Caldwell/Postmedia Network

Not a day goes by in these times without someone, somewhere making a reference to “advocacy.”

Most often, these references are related to such matters as race, gender, sexual orientation and public transit and transportation issues.

Seldom do they relate to the delivery of health care.

Having been a health care provider since 1967, I became a voracious health care consumer nine years ago.

At that time, I quickly learned that having an advocate in healthcare was an “essential” service that I required, rather than a non-essential one.

Without having an advocate to assist me in navigating the health care maze that confronted me, it would have been impossible for me to receive good care.

My family was inadequate to the task on its own. I needed a team effort.

With the help of my personal medical care providers – such as my family physician and cardiologist — we were able to adequately navigate the “system.”

But what became painfully obvious to me during this process was that political wrangling is suffocating our health care system.

By “political” I mean that family physicians and specialists have been adroitly maneuvered by governments into fighting with one another to the detriment of both patients and the health care system.

There appears to be little, if any, attempt to streamline the system so that administrative procedures actually work toward delivering smooth, uninterrupted medical care to patients.

The increasing number of specialties and sub-specialties cause medical wait times to vary widely – sometimes with disastrous consequences.

If we don’t demand corrective action from our federal and provincial governments, there will ultimately be nothing but chaos in our medical system, with patients needing treatment increasingly not getting any medical care at all.

We cannot allow our politicians to get away with this abdication of what they claim to be one of their primary elected responsibilities — ensuring that Canadians receive excellent health care.

Why, for example, with the Trudeau government, is there such a priority on legalizing cannabis, while relegating more important issues, such as health care, to a secondary or tertiary priority?

Or is funding party political coffers a greater priority for our supposedly concerned politicians?

Even health care economists who advocate for a 100% publicly funded health care system, know that our current and ever-increasing demands for health care as the Canadian population ages, far outstrip the capacity of the existing healthcare system to cope.

The treatment of heart disease, cancer, kidney disease, liver disease, gastrointestinal disease, blood-related ailments and their inter-relationships are just some of the life-saving requirements that affect every one of us at some time in our lives, including those who deliver health care.

Just ask family members who grieve the loss of loved ones before their time, after all the good they have done, because our health care system was not up to the job of giving them the timely care they needed.

Life and death are often unfair and capricious in and of themselves.

But when our health care system becomes part of the problem and not part of the solution in prolonging the duration and quality of our lives, then it is our political leaders and our governments who have failed us in one of the most important tasks we entrust to them.

The system needs major reform, but one of the biggest impediments to meaningful change on this file and so many others was described in the National Post by John Ivison in a Jan. 17 column.

As he wrote, “the problem with the Liberal party as articulated by former NDP leader Tommy Douglas, was that it often had a wish-bone where it should have had a back-bone. Yet Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are proving themselves as rigidly dogmatic in their world view as Stephen Harper’s Conservatives ever were.”

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